There Are Few Men More Entertaining Than Diggers, When One Can Get Them To Talk; There Is Hardly A Corner Of The Habitable Globe To Which They Have Not Penetrated.

Round a camp-fire one will hear tales of Africa, New Guinea, New Zealand, Australia, America from Alaska to

The Horn, Madagascar, and other strange countries that would be a mine of information to a writer of books of adventure - tales told in the main with truth and accuracy, and in the quiet, unostentatious manner of the habitual digger to whom poverty, riches, and hardships come all in their turn as a matter of course.

Having chosen my mates, the next thing to be done was to procure beasts of burden. Of numerous camels submitted for inspection I took three, which were subsequently christened "Czar," "Satan," and "Misery" respectively; the first from his noble and king-like mien, the second from his wild and exceedingly unpleasant habit of kicking and striking - habits due not to vice but to the nervousness of youth - and the third from his plaintive remonstrances and sad-eyed looks of reproach as his saddle and load were placed on his back.

The price of a good pack-camel then varied from 60 pounds to 80 pounds - and such prices as 100 pounds to 130 pounds were given for first-class riding-camels. For South Australian-bred camels, the descendants of stock originally imported from India by Sir Thomas Elder some thirty years ago, a higher price was asked than for those brought into the Colony direct from Kurrachi; and rightly, for there can be no doubt but that in size, strength, and endurance, the camel of Australian birth is far ahead of his old-world cousin. Not only are Indian camels smaller and less fitted for the heavy work of the interior, but their liability, until acclimatised, to mange and other diseases makes them most undesirable acquisitions.

The near approach of midsummer, and the known scarcity of water, had induced me to include in my equipment a portable condenser, by means of which we should convert the brine of the salt lakes into water fit to drink. It seemed an excellent plan and so simple, for lakes abound - on the maps; and wherever a lake is, there, by digging, will water be found, and thus we should be independent of rock-holes and other precarious sources of supply. Plans so simple on paper do not always "pan out" as confidently expected and a more odious job, or one which entailed more hard work, than prospecting with condensers I have not had to undertake. "Prospecting" is generally taken to mean searching for gold. In Western Australia in the hot weather it resolves itself into a continual battle for water, with the very unlikely contingency that, in the hunt for a drink, one may fall up against a nugget of gold or a gold-bearing quartz reef.

On November 10th we made a start from Coolgardie, and, travelling along the Twenty-five Mile road for some fifteen miles, we branched off in an easterly direction, to try some country where I had previously found "colours" of gold, when journeying from Kurnalpi to the Twenty-five Mile. Finding that in the meantime others had been there and pegged out leases and claims, we passed on and set up our condensers on the "Wind and Water" lake, and began to get an inkling that our job was not to be of the pleasantest.

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